Up to settlin' (for bat)
by The Readers Muse
Summary: He was still working that strangled, broken note when a hail of gunfire sang out around him.
**Disclaimer:** I don't own The Walking Dead. Everything belongs to whoever owns them, my wishful thinking aside.

 **Authors Note #1:** Based off the idea that it is Daryl than Negan kills in the season finale.

 **Warnings:** character death, angst, drama, extreme violence, injury, gore, blood, adult content, adult language.

 **Up to settlin' (for bat)**

He didn't feel the hits anymore. Just the vibrations. Just the cold concrete churl rippling out underneath him like the entire world was aiming to remind him that nothing - not flesh, not dirt, not even concrete - was built to last.

There was a man above him.

Some asshole with a two-tone grin and a barbed-wire bat dripping red.

Some asshole called Negan.

 _They were all Negan._

That was what his dogs kept repeatin' like a mantra, a broken record gone stale.

But this one- this one actually was.

He could tell.

* * *

He hadn't told the bastard nothin'.

But then again, that wasn't the point.

This was about sending a message.

Just like that kid's head one of them had bashed in from Hilltop to make a point.

To keep people cowed.

 _Afraid._

He was just the god damned sequel.

This was the consequences of their actions – _his actions_.

All those things that'd led up to this moment and this moment alone.

Merle used to say it too.

He'd used different words, but it was the same damn thing.

" _It's just business, little brother. Just business."_

* * *

He coughed up a blurt of red, gargling through shattered teeth as he choked on it. Regurgitating a broken laugh as one of the man's cronies yelled something indignant. Feeling one of the little bird-bones in his wrist creak, then _snap_ as a different one kicked out. Stomping splintering ivory against the concrete before Negan told him to quit it.

But it didn't matter.

He was still laughing.

If you could call it that.

He'd self-fulfilled his own god damned prophecy.

Because god knows, sooner or later every Dixon ended up dead in a ditch somewhere.

Guess the world hadn't changed that much after all.

* * *

He was still working that strangled, broken note when a hail of gunfire sang out around him.

His pulse, slow as it was now, counted out the drops.

Feeling the clatter through pain-numb bones as the man's bat fell beside him and rolled away.

 _Ashes, ashes, we all fall down._

He wheezed in a breath, eyes long since gone blind.

Trembling his way through a smile when all he could smell on the air was fire.

And just like that, like a calling card, she was there.

"Daryl… _oh god, oh_ -"

She had this way about her that meant he didn't need to see her to know she was cryin'.

It was the delicate way she breathed that gave her away every time.

"Daryl...no, please."

His name was a singular, shattered sound as it left her lips. All rustling clothes and the warm tang of her gun barrel pressed against his side as the scent of her smoothed over him like every good thing he didn't deserve. Folding herself down beside him as time oozed slow.

 _God, he was so cold._

He wasn't sure if he'd said it out loud, but that was the moment she gathered him up. All gentle hands and trickling salt as she cradled him. Catching his blood-streaked fingers in hers when they flexed out – reaching. Sobbing without sound into the ruin of him when he finally managed to choke out her name.

"Carol…"

* * *

He'd gotten too big for his britches.

Gone and broken the cardinal Dixon rule.

He'd let himself hope that if the others could settle, maybe, someday, he would too.

That maybe he and Carol might've-

 _Fuck it._

Because that feeling?

The one he got every time he looked her way and caught her smiling?

It'd been worth it.

Even if the lights were going out on him now, she'd been worth it.

 _She'd always been worth it._

* * *

He didn't know there was a darker color than black. But regardless of the fact that he couldn't see worth shit, that was what he was looking at.

A whole wack load of spiraling dark, punctuated by the frizzle of dying synapses and the pitching curdle of fluid-thick lungs struggling to make ends meet.

 _Still-_

He inhaled, breathing her in.

Wanting to remember this, _her_ , no matter which direction the big ol' elevator in the sky took him when his time came.

"Hey, you good?" he rasped, forcing her to come full circle with him as she hitched through a fractured sound. Soft hands knuckling down the only stretch of his face that he could still feel. Filling the air with a comforting string of sounds. Complex like words, only his ears couldn't quite make sense of them.

"No," she wavered, pebbling his skin with wet as she held him close. Grudgingly letting go of the weak of his wrist when he pulled it free from her grasp.

"Well," he quaked, shuddering into himself for a long moment before he found the strength to reach up and cup her chin with his hand. Bringing her down to where he figured his lips 'oughta be as the air around them thrummed with an unexpected rush of heat. "Come 'ere."

* * *

There was never an end point.

There was just her.

* * *

 **A/N:** Thank you for reading, please let me know what you think. – This story is now complete. Also, sorry.


End file.
